Kerr County sits on the Edwards Plateau, and the ground tells you most of what you need to know about septic here. Upland soils are shallow, stony clays and clay loams sitting directly on limestone, often too thin to absorb and treat effluent the conventional way. The county’s USDA soil survey is blunt about it: many sites need raised or specially engineered beds, and even then effluent can surface downslope or slip through fractured bedrock toward groundwater. That geology is why so many Kerr installs are aerobic systems with spray distribution, and why a licensed site evaluation, not a guess, decides what your land can support. It’s also why local stakes are high: the county’s drinking water comes from wells and the aquifer, with the Guadalupe River running through the middle of everything.
Kerr has more septic history than almost any county in Texas. It began requiring permits in 1977 (a dozen years before statewide rules existed) after failing systems around Kerrville South made Camp Meeting Creek one of the most polluted streams in the state. Three wastewater collection projects have since pulled the densest problem areas off septic. Still, the county remains an on-site county at heart: more than half of its roughly 54,000 residents live in unincorporated areas, subdivisions from Hunt to Center Point still run on individual systems, and so do over 30 summer camps along the river. The county fielded 182 OSSF permit applications in 2024 alone, and TCEQ’s annual reporting shows 200 authorizations to construct issued for Kerr County that year.
Two regulatory facts matter right now. Kerr County’s Environmental Health Department is the TCEQ-designated Authorized Agent. Permitting runs through the county office in Kerrville, not a TCEQ regional office. And the long-standing 10-acre permit exemption is gone: the Commissioners’ Court adopted a new OSSF order on July 13, 2026, TCEQ’s executive director approved it on August 7, 2026, and the order’s own Section 16 makes it effective on that approval date. Section 9 requires a permit for all on-site sewage facilities in the county regardless of acreage, with existing compliant systems grandfathered. If you’re building on acreage in Kerr County, budget for the permit. Details, fees, and forms are in our Kerr County septic permit guide.
Day to day, Kerr owners deal with the same questions as the rest of the Hill Country: what pumping costs, keeping aerobic maintenance contracts current, and protecting drain fields through drought. But they work with a thinner bench of providers than the metro corridors. That’s the gap this page exists to close: licensed, TCEQ-verified pumpers, installers, and maintenance providers who actually work in Kerr County, alongside the regional context that explains why your neighbor’s system looks nothing like one in Houston.
Kerr County office: Environmental Health Department, 550 Earl Garrett St., Suite 100, Kerrville. Phone (830) 896-9020. Full permit walkthrough here.
We only list providers we can check against TCEQ records — no padding, no scraped listings. Clear the filter to see every verified Kerr County pro, or tell us what you need and we’ll route it to pros who serve the area.
New installs and major repairs need a permit from the local authorized agent — usually the county, sometimes a city — and the rules that bind are the local ones.
Our permit guide covers fees, required professionals and every step.
Four things decide what you can build and what it costs: zoning, environmental protections, power for aerobic systems, and the ground itself. We publish each one only where we have checked it — and say so plainly where the answer is “same as the rest of Texas”.
Zoning & land use
Kerr County holds the septic rule at county level through the Environmental Health Department, and separately adopts Subdivision Rules and Regulations, last adopted 28 November 2022, which govern how a new lot in the unincorporated county is created. The county's OSSF Order is under revision — a draft dated 22 June 2026 is published for comment and proposes a permit requirement regardless of tract size. Treat the draft as a proposal, not as current law.
Nothing in Kerr County changes this.
Texas adds a separate approval path over the Edwards Aquifer recharge, transition and contributing zones, where TCEQ requires an Edwards Aquifer Protection Plan under 30 TAC Chapter 213. Elsewhere the Chapter 285 rules stand on their own.
The dominant constraint here is bedrock close to the surface (77.1% of rated soils), followed by so much gravel that effluent may reach groundwater before it is filtered (21.6%). NRCS rates 97.4% of rated ground very limited for a standard soil absorption field, 91.8% for subsurface drip and 47.8% for surface application with disinfection. Where a conventional field will not pass, surface application is usually the route that does.
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